Street Names of Coburg - a continuing story

from the Coburg Courier, December 1993.

It was Les Barnes who began the work of chronicling the history of Coburg through the story of its streets in his 1965 publication Street Names of Coburg. Since then there have been two more revised editions of this work, thanks to that other driving force of our area's local history - Laurie Burchell.

By the mid-1990s, Laurie and his team of Coburg Historical Society researchers had added well over 100 new entries and amended and added many more. It was a major undertaking in those days before the internet. The many, many resources we have available to us online today make the task of today's local historian both easier and harder. Sometimes you feel like you're drowning in the sea of information coming your way!

At the time of publication of the second edition of the book in late 1993, Laurie Burchell noted that there were 549 streets in Coburg and that the origins of 165 of those were unknown. 

(This third edition was published some time in the second half of 1994. Unfortunately, the date of publication has not been included, but there is a reference in the Foreword to the death of Les Barnes earlier in the year, confirming that it is a 1994 publication.)

Twenty-six years on and there are many more streets in Coburg and many more stories to be told. With the amount of subdivision and building work going on in the area, new streets are being created all the time.

It's time to revise and update the history of our streets. I'm working on it. My database includes the entries from Street Names of Coburg (I'm developing a similar one for Brunswick). I've added the streets in the Pentridge Village Development and the Kodak Development, plus anything else new I can discover. Once I've finished the foundation of the Coburg section, I'll work on Brunswick. 

It's a big task, but it's satisfying to build on the work of those who began it all those years ago.

If you want to take part in this project, please let me know by emailing me at gcheryl52@gmail.com.